NASA, IRS, NFL, CDC… need another acronym to keep track of?! How about WWDoP? WWDoP is short for Worldwide Day of Play, a concept created and promoted by Nickelodeon, home to kid-friendly programming and games. Started in 2004, the event encourages children from around the world to get away from the television and get physically active. Nickelodeon wholeheartedly invests in the day, suspending programming across all of its television channels and websites from noon to 3pm on WWDoP. Instead of SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer, kids will see a message urging them to “get up, go outside and play”.

We don’t know about you, but we need no further encouragement! Tag, kickball, red rover, hide-and-seek, or double dutch anyone? We’ll see you on the playground on September 20, 2014 for the 11th Annual Worldwide Day of Play!

Perched happily on top of wooden platforms, this rooster and his brood of eight colorful hens are waiting for someone to throw the cheese and hit a floorer. If that sounds like jibberish, you might want to brush up on the lingo for the game of skittles! While we think of skittles as a candy that lets you taste the rainbow, skittles is also a game related to bowling. The game has been played for centuries and there are several different regional versions. In Old English skittles, players throw a rounded piece of heavy wood called a cheese to knock over pins at the end of an alley. In other versions, players roll a small ball to knock over the pins.

The owner of these Steiff Company rooster and chicken skittles probably didn’t have the best aim, judging from the undamaged, brightly colored felt. Steiff produced skittles sets featuring felt animals from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. While the game of skittles has waned in popularity in recent decades, it is still played in the United Kingdom and is known as a game that is friendly and accessible, even for newcomers… just don’t call it bowling!

Ninety years ago today, eight dapper pilots began the first flight around the world in four airplanes that were later nicknamed the “World Fliers:” the Seattle, Boston, New Orleans, and Chicago. After 74 pit stops, Chicago and New Orleans completed the journey over 175 days with an in-air flight time of 371 hours and 11 minutes. That may seem slow compared to today’s world record of 41 hours and 7 minutes, but in 1924 (still three years before Charles Lindbergh’s famous solo flight across the Atlantic) the sensational success of the World Fliers fueled excitement about airplanes.

Capitalizing on this interest (do you see a common theme appearing here?!), Wolverine Supply & Manufacturing Company began making “Aeroplane Race ‘Round the World,” a tin board game that mapped out the planes’ exact route. Armed with their own miniature World Flier, two to four players spun a dial to fly around the board hoping to avoid forced landings, storms, or any of the other maladies that grounded the real pilots on their journey. Much like the Oregon Trail video game for children of the 1980s and 1990s, children had fun while learning about the actual hardships of aerial circumnavigation. Although, unlike the Oregon Trail and the real World Flier pilots, there was no risk of dysentery from drinking lagoon water!

If someone asked us if we wanted to play with some quizzes, our answer would most likely be no way (unless they were about our favorite sports team or gave us insight on our latest crush)! But, we could be passing up the chance to play with yo-yos.

Although the yo-yo’s origin is unknown, the most popular theory has the toy originating in 1000 B.C. China. Being an ancient toy, the yo-yo has had a lot of different names: quizzes, bandalores, chucki. Americans know it by it’s Filipino name, which means “come back,” thanks to Pedro Flores who began producing yo-yos when he immigrated to the United States in 1928. Two years later, he sold the company to Donald F. Duncan who produced T/m’s two-colored yo-yo.